Professional Documents
Culture Documents
3906ac Foraging
3906ac Foraging
Introduction
• Foraging has been looked at from a
functional angle for a long time
• Optimality models etc
• Then you have to look at what
mechanisms might make such
behaviour possible
How do optimality models
work?
• A Decision is Identified
– Where should an animal feed
– How long should it stay
– What food should it eat?
– Could be a ‘choice’ or it could be an evolutionary
decision
• Decide to leave an area
• ‘Decide’ to evolve the means to de-toxify a plant
• ‘Decide’ how long chewing teeth should be
Optimality Models – The Saga
Continues
• Assumptions are made about the currency
– What fitness correlated variable is important?
• Maximize energy gain?
• Minimize travel time?
• P(Survival until nightfall)
• Calories/hour
And finally……
• Assumptions are made about the constraints
– What fixed properties of the animal or the
environment affect the decision
• How much energy can you get out of a food item
• What is the encounter rate?
• How quickly do nectar sources renew themselves?
• How often will I encounter a giant man eating shark?
The Goal….
• Determine what decision, given the
constraints, maximizes the Currency
• Note that the model will be quantitative
• The model will make precise, testable
predictions
– Who says evolutionary theory does not
lead to testable hypotheses?
Belovsky and the Moose
• Belovsky has done a
bunch of work on many
different species
• Question, how much
aquatic vegetation
should a moose eat?
• Constraints include
sodium and rumen size
Marginal Value Theorem
• Charnov (1976)
• If P = e / h
– Where P is Profitability, e is energy and h
is handling time
• An animal should leave a food patch
when P(current patch) = (P(all patches))
/ number of patches
For the mathematically
inclined